The Economics of New Health Technologies : Incentives, Organization, and Financing

Technological change in healthcare has led to huge improvements in health services and the health status of populations. It is also pinpointed as the main driver of healthcare expenditure. Although offering remarkable benefits, changes in technology are not free and often entail significant financial, as well as physical or social risks. These need to be balanced out in the setting of government regulations, insurance contracts, and individual's decisions to use and consume certain technologies. With this in mind, this book addresses the following important objectives: to provide a detailed analysis of what technological change is; to identify drivers of innovation in several healthcare areas; to present existing mechanisms and processes for ensuring and valuing efficiency and development in the use of medical technologies; and to analyze the impact of advances in medical technology on health, healthcare expenditure, and health insurance.

Each of the seventeen chapters summarizes an important issue concerning the innovation debate and contributes to a better understanding of the role innovation has both at the macro level and at the delivery (meso) and micro level in the healthcare sector. The effectiveness of innovation in improving people's welfare depends on its diffusion and inception by the relevant agents in the health production process, and this book recognizes the multi-faceted contribution of policy makers, regulators, managers, technicians, consumers and patients to this technology.

This book offers the first truly global economic analysis of healthcare technologies, taking the subject beyond simply economic evaluation and exploring the behavioral aspects, organization and incentives for new technology developments, and the adoption and diffusion of these technologies.

Dr Joan Costa-Font teaches political economy and European social policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and has previously taught Economics at the University of Barcelona. Dr Costa-Font is a fellow of CESifo (Munich), the health econometrics and data group (York), FEDEA (Madrid) , IESE Business School and CAEPS (Barcelona). He has received various awards, including the Bayer Health Economics Award in 2003, the Edad &Vida Research award in 2006 and the Rogeli Duacastella Award on Social Science granted by the Foundation "La Caixa" in 2008. He has acted as an economic and research consultant for the Word Bank, the European Commission, the Spanish Ministry of Health and the Catalan Ministry of Trade as well as for private organisations. Christophe Courbage, PhD in Economics, is Director of the Health and Ageing and Insurance Economics research programmes at the Geneva Association. He lectures in Health Economics at the University of Lausanne, and "International Faculty" at the Singapore College of Insurance. Dr Courbage is also Deputy Editor of The Geneva Papers and Executive Secretary of the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists (EGRIE). Dr Courbage was awarded the 1999 Ernst Meyer Prize by the Geneva Association for the best PhD thesis in Insurance Economics, is Deputy Editor of The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice, and is Executive Secretary of the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists (EGRIE). Professor Alistair McGuire [BA (Econ); MLitt (Econ); PhD (Econ)] is a Professor in Health Economics at LSE Health and Social Care. He has been professor of Economic at City University and thought at Oxford and Aberdeen. Professor McGuire has written numerous books, articles and reports in this area. He has also acted as an advisor to numerous UK government offices and research councils (including the ESRC and the MRC), as well as an economic consultant to a number of foreign governments, and domestic and foreign corporations and pharmaceutical companies. His current interests are in economic evaluation (especially when conducted alongside clinical trials), the economics of the hospital, technological diffusion, and health care insurance.